This fortnight's Small Shift, Big Impact is for the symptoms you've stopped questioning. The morning that feels like wading through fog. The afternoon you can't think your way out of. The evening you're somehow both wired and flat. The night you lie there exhausted, asking your body to please just sleep.
Most of us treat these as separate problems. They might be the same one, showing up at different hours.
Pick one, just one, for the next two weeks.
Front-Loading Your Day
Get Morning Sun
The Wind-Down That Isn't Working
1. Front-Loading Your Day
It's 9pm. The kids are down, the dishwasher is humming, and you find yourself looking for something in the kitchen. A piece of toast. A spoonful of peanut butter. Something sweet with your tea.
It's easy to read this as a habit to break. It might be the opposite. It might be your body asking for what it didn't get earlier in the day.
The body runs on a 24-hour rhythm. In the morning, it's set up to use fuel. Insulin sensitivity is higher, cortisol is naturally peaking, and digestion is at its most efficient. As the day goes on, those systems gradually wind down.
When breakfast is a coffee and lunch is squeezed in at the desk, the day's fuel hasn't actually been delivered. The body still needs it. So once things finally slow down in the evening, it goes looking. That's not something you're doing wrong. It's a rhythm issue.
Giving the body more of what it needs earlier in the day is what tends to settle the evening on its own.
This fortnight's Small Shifts, Big Impact is for the bloating you've stopped questioning, the lunches eaten standing at the bench, the gut that plays up in your busiest weeks, and the growing list of foods you're suspicious of.
The food gets the blame, but digestion runs on the rest-and-digest side of your nervous system, and when the day never slows, the gut is often where it shows first. It's...
This fortnight's Small Shifts, Big Impact is for the weekends that still feel like weekdays, for arriving at Monday no more rested than you left Friday, for treating rest like something you earn once the list is done.
Your nervous system reads pace, not the calendar. If the pace does not change, it does not register that anything has shifted, no matter what day it says at the top of the page.
P...
This fortnight's Small Shifts, Big Impact is for the mornings that start in a rush, the first hour that is gone before you've caught up with it, and the sense of being behind before the day has properly begun.
How you spend the first hour tends to set the pace your nervous system runs at all day. Begin it wired and rushing, and your body carries that urgency into everything after.
Pick one, jus...
Fortnightly NewsletterÂ
Small Shifts, Big Impact
Three evidenced-based micro-habits, every fortnight. For high-functioning women who look fine and feel fried.
Why Your Energy Disappears Every Afternoon
For high-functioning women who hit the wall every afternoon and don't know why. A free two-minute self-assessment, five questions, that shows you where your energy is quietly leaking.
